Laoise de Brún
Barrister, campaigner and founder of The Countess
Ireland is often held up as a cautionary tale or a model in British debates over sex-based rights. Laoise de Brún — barrister, former BBC and Channel 4 documentary maker, and founder of Dublin's The Countess — has spent five years winning those fights in Ireland. What she has learned belongs in every British courtroom, classroom and parliamentary committee room.
Laoise de Brún trained as a barrister before building a career in documentary filmmaking, producing work for BBC and Channel 4. That combination of legal precision and public-facing storytelling proved decisive when she founded The Countess, an Irish campaigning organisation dedicated to protecting sex-based rights for women and children — named in honour of Countess Markievicz, the first woman elected to the Westminster Parliament.
Over five years of advocacy, de Brún and The Countess have accumulated legislative wins that British campaigners can only regard with envy. Her organisation drafted legislation to separate prison placement by sex — a fight still acutely live on this side of the Irish Sea, where Ministry of Justice policy on transgender prisoners remains bitterly contested and advocates continue to push for the same clarity Ireland has pursued in law. The Irish experience shows what is possible when campaigners combine forensic legal argument with sustained public pressure.
She joined Beyond Gender hosts Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman in January 2026 for the episode The Countess Didn't Fight For This: Ireland and the Battle for Women's Rights. The conversation mapped the shared political terrain between Ireland and Britain: two countries, one land border and a single rolling argument about what sex-based rights actually mean in prisons, in schools, in hospitals and in law. The Countess Markievicz who inspired the group's name was herself elected to Westminster — a reminder that the two women's movements have never been entirely separate.
For British listeners navigating the Cass Review's findings, the closure of the Tavistock clinic and an ongoing parliamentary contest over sex-based protections, de Brún's testimony is a practical field report: this is what organised, legally literate, values-grounded campaigning can achieve — and how quickly a political consensus can shift when women refuse to back down.
